BOOK: ‘Tasting History’ details how civilizations formed and grew through their food recipes
Culture creates cuisine.
Poor people turn to foods that are filling and meals that are easy to stretch. The jaded wealthy demand scarce items and elaborate feasts. Soldiers and explorers need things that don’t spoil quickly or require reheating.
We eat how we live.
But, as “Tasting History” by Max Miller with Ann Volkwein shows, recipes work in reverse, too. Look at a list of ingredients, work backward, and you can see what a civilization farmed, traded for, and treasured. Recreate that dish, and you get a sense of how other people lived.
The book was inspired by his YouTube channel “Tasting History with Max Miller.” The shows started in February 2020 but took off a month later during the lockdown.
“People all over the world hunkered down in their homes and became obsessed with making sourdough bread,” he writes. “I, grateful for a distraction, was there to teach them its history. Though it was not sourdough, but garum, a fermented fish sauce from Ancient Rome, and something I wouldn’t encourage anyone to make at home, that really made the channel take off.”
Miller brought the show’s wry and unpretentious approach to the book but with some improvements. Chief among them? You can look at his recipes as you cook without ever having to hit pause.
Home cooks can also quickly consult the glossary. They may need to. Modern markets probably don’t stock many of the ancient world’s favorite ingredients. But Miller helpfully suggests substitutes for hard-to-find items. Any Asian fish sauce can take the place of garum. If something can be left out of a recipe, he notes that, as well.
He admits that many of these dishes are recreations, as ancient chefs rarely wrote down measurements or methods of preparation. (“Put in good things and cook until it is enough” is one typical surviving recipe.) For an Egyptian dessert called Tiger Nut Cake, Miller didn’t even have hieroglyphs to go on — just a tomb painting.
Is his cake going to taste exactly like the one from 1740 B.C.E.? Who would know for sure? But with nuts, honey, and date syrup, it’s likely to taste pretty good.
Many of the Roman recipes are a little disappointing, and understandably so. The entire empire seemed addicted to that fish sauce. It would be more than 1,000 years before an Italian saw a tomato.
Still, some dishes sound intriguing and even a little familiar. For example, the Romans lived on globi, a mix of whole grain flour and ricotta rolled in balls, deep fried, and topped with honey and poppy seeds. The ancients were gobbling them down circa 160 B.C.E., but they wouldn’t look that out of place today at the San Gennaro Festival.
Other dishes may sound less appealing today. Marcus Gavius Apicius, Rome’s most famous gourmet, wrote the classic “On the Subject of Cooking,” but his tastes were a little unusual even then, with his dinner parties featuring sow’s udder stuffed with sea urchins.
“When it came to dictating what was and was not acceptable to eat for the upper classes, Apicurus’ word was practically law,” Miller writes. “He convinced Drusus (Julius Caesar) the son of Emperor Tiberius, to shun cabbage sprouts and cabbage tops, as they were fit only for the common folks, and instead urged his guests toward flamingo tongue, or pork liver from a pig fed on the finest dried figs and made to get drunk on honeyed wine on its way to slaughter.”
Easily influenced foodies followed his instructions, but there may be more pleasure in the old snob’s simpler recipes — like mussels steamed with leeks, two kinds of wine, herbs, and cumin (and that inescapable fish sauce).
Miller’s search for ancient edibles takes him around the globe, to the historical empires of Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas. But while specific foods may have been born in particular regions, trade and conquest soon spread them to other cultures.
Take the samosa — or, if you like, sambusah, sambusa, or samasa.
“Many names for the same thing: pastry stuffed with spiced filling, then baked or fried,” he explains. “Likely made somewhere in Central Asia, the original samosa was a way to preserve meat for long journeys. As Muslim traders traveled across Asia and Africa and into Spain, they brought the samosa with them. Each culture who adopted the dish made it their own.”
So the next time you’re enjoying a Spanish empanada or a Somalian sambusa, thank the traveling merchant who first brought along some pastries to share.
For many readers, other, newer dishes will be more familiar. Yet they still have the ability to surprise.
Gingerbread, for example, goes back to at least 14th-century England. One story traces it to a 10th-century Armenian monk, Gregory of Nicopolis. Chaucer mentions it in “The Canterbury Tales,” and the first Queen Elizabeth gave it as gifts.
Originally, though, it was more of a sticky, strongly-flavored candy made with sugar and honey and several spices than a cookie. Sandalwood powder added a bit of color. Miller advises, “a drop of red food coloring can be used instead.”
Unexpected flavors, at least to modern tastes, seemed to be a hallmark of old English cooking. A recipe for pumpkin pie that Miller includes — they still spelled it “pumpion” — calls for rosemary, parsley, and thyme. And a dish of parmesan cheese ice cream would definitely take some getting used to.
Modern diners may find other dishes more appetizing. The elegant-sounding 18th-century Italian dish pomodori farcite all’Erbette isn’t much more than tomatoes stuffed with cheese, prosciutto, arugula, and herbs and then quickly cooked, and it looks delicious.
And although the words stobach gaedhealach may sound forbidding, translated they merely mean Irish stew, and if you have potatoes and onions, bacon and lamb, water, salt, and pepper, you could make a pot of it tonight.
He includes an American recipe from 1862 for a cocktail made with gin, bitters, curacao, and gum syrup. And there’s the Yankee chef Fannie Farmer’s famous vinegar candy, a kind of sour taffy. (It probably tastes better than it sounds. It would have to.)
The newest recipe Miller includes is a 1914 one for Texas Pecan Pie, and it closes out the book. It is a sweet end and, the author hopes, the start of a culinary change.
“It was in the 1930s that pecan pie made the leap to Thanksgiving tables all over the country when Karo Syrup started slapping a recipe (for it) on the back of every bottle of their corn syrup,” he writes, “and, of course, included their syrup as a major ingredient.” The result was a sickly-sweet overload.
This older recipe, Miller promises, avoids that by using dark brown sugar and whole milk rather than corn syrup and the usual can of condensed. Three large eggs, a tablespoon of flour, and a pinch of kosher salt complete the simple filling, poured into a prebaked pie crust, and cooked. Top with meringue, if you like.
The resulting dessert is probably a lot better than the ones many Americans grew up with. And proof, perhaps, that sometimes the oldest ways are the best.
Just — please — skip the flamingo tongues main course and parmesan cheese ice cream dessert.
